A Louisiana gas plant sea wall shows challenges of flooding, energy demand

> While Venture Global declined to make officials available for interviews, it has insisted its steel wall is designed to withstand a once-in-500 years storm.

The problem with those "once-in-500 years" figures is that they are based on historical data - and climate change is rapidly invalidating that data. Climate change doesn't mean it's 1.5°C warmer year-round, or the sea level is 20cm higher worldwide: it means weather becomes more more extreme. What was a "once-in-500" event a few decades ago might turn into a "once-in-25" event a few years from now. We are already noticing those changes in day-to-day life!

Concrete seawalls are almost always inferior to well engineered earth structures. Only when space is at a premium it may be better to use concrete, but in roughly all other cases a concrete structure is more expensive and more likely to fail catastrophically. But somehow a lot of people have the "something substantial needs to be done" mindset and just don't think moving earth is substantial enough. Or at least that is my tale when I see the pictures. Maybe someone knowledgeable on the local situation can chime in on why concrete was chosen?

> How far will the fossil fuel industry go to protect itself from climate impacts it helped cause?

As far as their customers take them :)

- sent from my iPhone which was delivered to me via fossil fuels

If you're interested in the dynamic in this area of the country, I highly recommend the 2022 game Norco[1]. It's really more of a piece of literature than a game, and it tries to capture the dynamic of the folks who rely upon a similar plant in LA for their livelihoods.

(At the risk of overselling a point-and-click game, I'll literally buy it for you if you're on the fence about it. I thought it was that good).

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1221250/NORCO/

It's funny how the article portrays this as a key driver of climate change, when in fact natural gas displacing coal has significantly _reduced_ US carbon emissions over the last 20 years!

Louisiana is also home of the largest pumping station on earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Intracoastal_Waterway_Wes...

Judging by the freely trafficked drone footage there is no "Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act" style protection for the fossil fuel industry in LA. Seems like the industry's lobbyists are just a waste of money :) One can also wonder whether it is a pure sea wall or a security measure against protesters or say people seeking refuge when displaced by some future flooding, etc. I mean it looks like a setting from some cataclismic movie.

Maybe this article can help highlighting the current trend of seeing natural gas as a solution to global warming. Germany and the green political movement there has been defining natural gas as green investment for years, and new natural gas power plants are being scaled up to match increase energy demands. The general rationalization is that cheap natural gas is seen as required for grid stability and as reserve energy.

With the current political climate in Europe, there seems to also be a general view among current climate activists that the US should export more LNG as gas consumption in EU rises.

It seems the question is whether a 26-foot-high steel wall is enough. I would have liked more engineering detail.

It's quoting experts instead of describing what studies that have been done.

Nobody can get homeowners insurance anymore but the garden variety big dick money men are chill with building a 11 figure investment below sea level in a flood plain surrounded by a half assed wall?

The older I get the more I realize the rich and powerful running the worlds corporations are probably significantly dumber than the average person.

I grew up along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas.

Louisiana is, frankly, a shitshow when it comes to making smart long-term decisions. Corruption is rampant and businesses generally have politicians in their pockets. Those businesses are able to effectively offload their externalities, so they are incentivized to destroy the environment while reaping the short-term profits.

If you want any prediction as to how things will go in Louisiana, the easy answer is "poorly" and you'll be right most of the time. It's honestly hard to expect better from a place whose largest city's motto is "Let the good times roll". The local culture is just deeply broken.

At the same time, I'm really disappointed that this article almost completely glossed over one of the major challenges facing Louisiana that has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. The only tangential mention is:

> Last November, Louisiana broke ground on a $2.3 billion project to shunt some of the muddy flows of Mississippi under and past Ironton into degraded wetlands to the west. The project is being financed largely with settlement money from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, and aims to halt losses of wetlands by mimicking the Mississippi River’s historic path.

When the article notes:

> Since 1932, the state has lost more than 1,900 square miles of land, an area equal to the state of Delaware

It implies that the loss was primarily climate change, but that's not true at all.

Most of this loss was driven by the way the Army Corps of Engineers has managed the Mississippi River. For millions of years, the Mississippi River went through periodic oscillations. As the river dumped more and more sediment into the delta, the delta would build up until eventually it started blocking the flow. The majority of the flow would then shift to the Atchafalaya river. That river would empty into the Gulf and its delta would build up sediment. Eventually, it would reach a level where the Mississippi was again the easiest route to the Gulf and flow would change again. That periodic meandering route to the Gulf is what created the entire southern half of Louisiana and is why it is such astonishingly fertile land (well, not so much "land" now).

But for the past hundred years, the Army Corps of Engineers has been instructed to build floodwalls along the Mississippi to avoid floods in the midwest. Those floodwalls increase the overall flow rate so that by the time the river reaches southern Louisiana, it's moving too fast to deposit sediment in the delta like it used to and instead it gets washed farther out into the Gulf.

At the same time, the Corps has been responsible for keeping most of the water flowing into the Gulf going through the Mississippi side instead of the Atchafalaya so that the Port of New Orleans doesn't get hurt economically. That also means that the river isn't allowed to meander and build up sediment across the southern edge of the state.

If you think of Louisiana as a boot, this is why the "toe" (where the Mississippi dumps into the Gulf) is getting longer while the instep (the middle of the state where the Atchafalaya) is disappearing.

All of this was true and has been happening for decades before any significant climate change occurred. It's still 100% human-caused, and known, and preventable. But it's not from carbon in the atmosphere and sea level rise, though those are now exacerbating it.

If you want to learn more about engineering the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, read John McPhee's Atchfalaya, written almost 40 years ago: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya

If you want to learn more about Louisiana's paradoxical culture around the environment, read Arlie Russell Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land".

A reminder that the federal government still showers the fossil fuel industry with money and favorable tax regulations in almost every form imaginable.

* Name-your-price expenses for drilling costs

* Superfund-cleanup-excise-tax exemptions for crude extracted from certain kinds of fields

* A tax rate of 21% thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (it was 35%)

* Explicit subsidies

* Underpricing the environmental, health, and economic damage/expenses/losses caused by fossil fuel burning (versus renewable energy)

* Near-freezing of sales taxes on fossil fuels, resulting in them falling dramatically when adjusted for inflation despite growing evidence of how widespread their harm is, and obvious growing costs from their continued use

In 2021, the federal government gave the coal industry alone half a billion dollars in "R&D" funding.

Meanwhile there's a myth that we need all this for "energy independence." We've gone well beyond "energy independence" to "fourth largest exporter of oil" and "#1 in oil extraction in the world." We extract twice as much oil as the Saudis.

One of the reasons "green" tech was so expensive for so long: the massive handouts being given to the fossil fuel industry. The next time you're filling up your gas tank and grumbling about high gas prices, think about how they receive at least twenty billion dollars a year from the feds - not counting state and local stuff.

Only in the last 2-3 years has funding for renewable energy technology started to approach that being given the (heavily established, dominating) fossil fuel industry.

What's wild is that despite those huge handouts for fossil fuel industries, solar and wind dropped below fossil fuel costs (per GWhr) well before the funding increase, and have continued to drop.

Don't even get me started on the handouts the nuclear (fission) industry gets, including free training for thousands of nuclear plant techs thanks to the navy...while the cost of nuclear power has only gone up despite being only a decade or two shy of a century worth of development.